Chris Mi is a fellow of IEEE and SAE, Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Director of the US DOE funded GATE Center for Electric Drive Transportation at San Diego State University, San Diego, California, USA. He was previously a professor at the University of Michigan, Dearborn from 2001 to 2015. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, all in electrical engineering.  Previously he was an Electrical Engineer with General Electric Canada Inc. He was the President and the Chief Technical Officer of 1Power Solutions, Inc. from 2008 to 2011. He is the Co-Founder of SNC Technology.

       There have been tremendous development in electric machines. In this presentation, we will look at two of them: wireless power transfer enabled electric machines and electrostatic machines. Wireless power transfer (WPT) technology has made significant progress in the recent decade covering a broad spectrum of applications, such as consumer electronics, body implant devices, and electric vehicles. Both capacitive and inductive wireless power transfer technology have been investigated for various applications. In the first part of this presentation, we will discuss the application of WPT in electric machines. WPT technology can be used to transfer power to rotary loads. WPT technology is useful where the explosion hazards exist like in mines. Finally, we will discuss the latest progress of capacitive electric machines that uses the principle of electric field instead of magnetic field as we traditionally understand electric machines. In the second part of the presentation, we will briefly discuss electric machines based on the electric field principle, or electrostatic machines, or capacitive motors.